Re: Decoded time accessors

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2019 21:43:26 +0000
> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> My limited experience of this is that people don't bother to write the
> necessary doc strings, or don't bother to write them properly, so one is
> left guessing at the precise semantics.  For example the doc string for
> `file-attribute-size' is poor, whereas the doc string for
> `file-attribute' is better, though still not perfect.  To understand the
> former, one must read _both_ doc strings.  This is not a win.

Can you tell more about your example?  AFAICT, file-attribute-size
just repeats what file-attributes says about its 7th element, nothing
more, nothing less.  What is missing from the doc string of the former
that requires you to read the latter?

> I disagree.  All these "readability hacks" greatly increase the number
> of functions a hacker must cope with

I think "must" hear is inaccurate, because you can still reference the
original list by element numbers.  Only those who want it will use the
accessors.